Photosynthesis - a Reenactment (How to teach a 7 year old about photosynthesis?)

In order to explain photosynthesis to my 6-9 year olds at my weekly workshop, I first thought of the picture idea - making each reactant and product of photosynthesis a picture. For instance the leaf is a food factory, then there's water (raindrop), light (sun) and carbon dioxide (which comes from people breathing or car exhausts) - easy pictures to draw, and the products being glucose (a form of sugar - therefore picture is sugar cube) and oxygen (again humans need this to breath). I thought I would get the students to draw each of these and make a pictorial representation of photosynthesis.

But then I thought it would be even better to reenact the process of photosynthesis - as a whole group. I made large picture symbols to represent each reactant and product, and gave each symbol to a student. So one student would be the sun, another water, another carbon dioxide. All three "reactants" had to go to the leaf (a large green blob in the middle of the room). There they found cholorphyll (yet another student sitting in the leaf holding a big green sign - chlorophyll) and when all these combined in the leaf, oxygen (a student holding an big O2 sign) and sugar (another student holding a bowl of fruit-loops) were produced and released from the leaf.

It worked out really well. The kids had fun, and they totally understood the photosynthesis process at the end. We did this a few times, having the kids rotate the roles. We even discussed the change of colour of the leaves in the fall. Awesome!

I think another idea could be to actually have costumes for all the roles - so the kids would actually have to dress up... more fun I suspect, although I haven't tried that version.